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The Cinderella fairy tale often draws knee-jerk reactions about passive heroines. Even some of her arguably more passive fairy tale sisters, like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, are afforded more grace than the woman who rises from the ashes to become a princess. She’s painted as the ultimate in passivity, a girl who waits to be rescued and is rewarded for it. But what this sort of interpretation of Cinderella stories forgets is that it’s very hard to free yourself from an abusive situation and that if someone pushes you down long enough, you start to believe that they’re right.

Yuzu, the heroine of The Ogre’s Bride, is a prime example. After her younger sister Karin was dubbed the favorite, perfect child by their parents – something which occurred very early in their lives – she was shunted to the side and largely neglected. Her parents treated her like a servant, worth nothing more than what she could do for them, while they upheld Karin as the perfect, pretty princess daughter. By the time we meet Yuzu at age eighteen, she has suffered intense emotional damage from her parents’ (and later sister’s) abuse and neglect. That she’s able to stand up for herself at all is remarkable, and when she finally runs away from home, it’s because her actual life was threatened by her sister’s kitsune fiancé, an escalation that pushed her to act. Yuzu appears passive, but she really is a survivor stumbling her way into the light.

Her strength, however, isn’t the sort we more typically see in anime. Saori Hayami‘s breathy, pained delivery of Yuzu’s lines is more often given to the truly passive characters who enjoy nothing more than coddling their man. In this case, Hayami uses it to show that Yuzu is afraid of being noticed, and it works, but it also requires more active viewing to fully appreciate. Her life has taught her that being noticed is both something she can’t expect from those meant to love her (her parents) and something dangerous for her sister and Yota, which the flashback episodes do a remarkably good job of showing. That means that even understanding the bride system followed by the ayakashi and hearing Reiya vow his love to her, it would be hard to fully accept that she’s in a place where she’s safe and loved. She might come across as a bit wishy-washy, but seen in a different light, she’s simply trying to protect herself.

Yuzu’s situation with her family drives the plot. While Reiya rescues her and gives her a stable living environment and a couple of adorable lesser ogre protectors, Yuzu’s relationship with Karin matters most. Karin’s entitlement is fully created by the girls’ parents, who taught her that her sister doesn’t matter and that she’s cute and pretty enough to deserve everything the world has to offer. They took everything from Yuzu and gave it to Karin, from parental care to education. Their firm belief that Karin could become a bride, and thus ensure their own financial well-being, is the catalyst for everything that happens, and the fact that Karin was, in fact, chosen by Yota only makes them all the more certain that they’re right. The moment when it becomes apparent that Yuzu is the sister who snared the better demon (ogres are more highly ranked than kitsune), they immediately attempt to shift their care from Karin to Yuzu. This, as you might imagine, only worsens the sisters’ relationship, with Karin resenting Yuzu venomously.

If Yuzu has largely been shaped by the abuse she received, Karin has been spoiled by the opposite. Her parents made her who she is, and who she is is an entitled little twerp, the exact opposite of her sister. Interestingly enough, this is as much a fairy-tale element as Yuzu’s Cinderella story; the tale type known as “The Kind and the Unkind Girls” is specifically about two opposite sisters with the same traits as Karin and Yuzu. The kind sister is ultimately rewarded, as Yuzu is with a loving fiancé, riches, and safety. The unkind sister loses everything she thought she had through her selfish actions. Karin combines the unkind girl and Cinderella’s wicked sister, and her utter lack of self-awareness and consequences sink her. Of course, this use of folkloric tropes reduces elements of the story to their most basic form, particularly at the end of the series when Karin’s chickens come home to roost. But she arguably wouldn’t have been able to understand the results of her attitude and actions if they came more subtly, and Yuzu likewise wouldn’t have fully understood that she was safe from her abusers.

Although some may feel differently, I don’t think the show tries to make Karin sympathetic at all. The flashbacks do show that she was guided into her worst self by her parents, but the choice was still hers. Yota, her fiancé, is much more sympathetic only because we know what the bride system can do to a male ayakashi; it’s similar to the fated mates issue in shifter fiction or omegaverse stories. Yota likely had little control over his actions when it came to Karin, especially since he’s still a teenager. To a degree, it feels like he’s punished for the crime of being a teenage boy, but he also didn’t have the wherewithal to stand up to Karin when she made unreasonable demands.

Visually, this series is a mixed bag. When the plot demands it, the art and animation can be very good, but for the most part it settles firmly in the middle ground. The lesser ogres are precious, but other character designs are nothing to write home about. The voicework is generally very good, though, as are the theme songs. I do wish the translation had used “ayakashi” instead of “demons,” however, as the two are very different things.

The Ogre’s Bride is a true Cinderella story in that the Cinderella figure is a survivor. She’s been abused and put down by those meant to care for her, and when she’s rescued, she can’t quite believe her good luck. Yuzu still has a long way to go to truly come into her own, but the series’ bookending with her ex-boyfriend shows how far she’s already come. She may read as passive at first glance, but there’s more to her and her story than that.